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Once a ruin in the lacklustre terrain across the Spree River from the abandoned Reichstag, the Lehrter Bahnhof is now Berlin's central train station, at the very heart of the nation's pulsing capital. Its dramatic rebuilding has been a costly and protracted affair. And the architects took Deutsche Bahn to court for bastardising their plans. The court's finding: if Deutsche Bahn can prove that its alterations saved costs, it can complete the station as it sees fit. Horst Bredekamp argues that if the new plans did not reduce costs, Deutsche Bahn should be obliged to "negate the negation" and build the station as the architects conceived it - and thus save the station and the city from an ugly disfigurement.

24/11/2005

Bodily harm to a train station

If the German Railway has its way, nothing will remain of Berlin's new central station but a monstrosity. By Horst Bredekamp

There is no better way to begin a visit to Berlin than with a short ride on Berlin's "S-Bahn" from Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse to Alexanderplatz, the two buildings that ushered in the era of the elevated railway station. It's an unforgettable first impression: gliding through the city at second-floor window height. The best bit is passing the Museum Island, where the interplay of art and transport perfectly embodies Berlin's bipolar attitude to life.

Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse has been superbly restored as part of a strategy on the part of German Railways, or Die Bahn,
to keep up with airline competition. Die Bahn often drives us to
distraction with poor service, but these efforts can truly be said to
represent a return of railway station culture. A great promise, especially for Germany's eastern states. Lehrter Bahnhof, one stop before Friedrichstrasse, was to be the jewel in the crown
and Berlin's new main station. The building really does deserve
superlatives. Its logistical and structural achievements make
it a place of pilgrimage for engineers from all over the world. One of
the wonders of the project is that the Berliners noticed almost nothing
of the colossal construction work; life simply went on as usual.

The prize-winning design by Gerkan, Marg and Partners
with two towers looking over the curve of the station roof, promised to
become Berlin's architectural landmark of the twenty-first century. It was to claim its place in Berlin's long and famous tradition of artistic industrial architecture â from Peter Behrens' AEG Turbine Factory and Josef Paul Kleihues' workshop building for the city refuse disposal services through to Oswald Mathias Ungers' sewage pumping station.

Like
every artefact, a building either succeeds or fails. Berlin's recent
architectural history is full of examples of both, but Lehrter Bahnhof
takes this process to a new dimension. When it opens, it will
give Berlin a new centre and transform the very fabric of the city,
reconfiguring its rhythm and orchestration. For one thing, it will link up with the Potsdamer Platz development. The Hamburger
Bahnhof, the Natural History Museum and Charité hospital will shift
suddenly from the periphery to the centre of attention. The surrounding
urban wasteland currently lends the station building the aura of a flying saucer, but it will, in all probability, quickly disappear. The changes to the appearance of Lehrter Bahnhof are instrumental in this respect.

Public concern was first aroused in 2001, when it was announced that 130 metres were to be simply lopped off
the length of the 450-metre glass roof. A length of 320 metres still
seemed gigantic, and as the glistening tube began to take shape the
harm initially appeared relative. But as the office towers grew, the
calamity became more obvious with every passing day. The interplay
between the length of the ribbon of glass and the height of the towers,
originally in a charged equilibrium, now insults any sense of
proportion. One can imagine what a cinematic effect the trains
would have offered, accelerating out like bullets from a gun. Now they
will just chunter off into the open air. The sleek beast that would
have encompassed these platforms has mutated into a lumpy monstrosity.

Others
have already demonstrated that neither time nor money justified the
shortening. The architectural firm Gerkan, Marg and Partners is famous
â indeed among architects, sometimes feared â for its punctuality and
cost-efficiency. The glass panels had already been made. And the
ultimate irony of the short roof is that the front carriages of the
high-speed ICE trains will be left out in the wind and rain â the first class. A populist move? We will never know. But the intervention certainly impairs the station's function as well as its appearance.

The deformation of the interior is
no less gratuitous and equally fatal. The architects had planned a
neo-Gothic vault with great pointed arches curving over the underground
floors to create a gigantic subterranean hall. The arches receding into
the distance on different levels would have called to mind the
lightness of Arab architecture. The planned lighting and
acoustics would have liberated the huge space from the auditory and
visual noise of DIY stores and supermarkets. The designation "cathedral of transport"
would not have seemed exaggerated for this ennoblement of functional
architecture. Europe would have gained an unparalleled underground
theatre of light and motion.

But it was not to be. In the summer of
2004 â after the contract for the arched roof had been put out to
tender â a Berlin firm of architects was commissioned to construct the
most hideous of all flat ceiling solutions, grey steel cladding.
The horribleness of this is particularly clear at the places where the
ascending columns pierce the suspended ceiling. The round openings
intersect aimlessly with the beginnings of the arches, providing
glimpses into the wasted space behind.

The cathedral of
transport has turned into a warehouse roofed with conveyor belts. Where
the aerodynamic forms of the trains would have been taken up and
amplified by the vaults, they appear instead truncated by the flat
ceiling. It is as if the trains are being squeezed into the platforms
like the guests crammed into tubes in Japanese capsule hotels.

The
Western understanding recoils at the idea that visual forms belong in
the realm of those secondary worlds which can be accepted or rejected
according to preference. The interventions in the appearance of Lehrter
Bahnhof surpass even that level ofignorance by devaluing forms that have already been built. Acts of this sort do not play out at the level of secondary phenomena â Aby Warburg spoke of the "human rights of the eye".
Here physical perceptions are affected, and for that reason, the
alterations amount to bodily harm to the millions who will enter this
station. It is the biggest disaster Die Bahn has ever inflicted on the
citizens.

In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, design was respected. "Visions", once laid down, were binding for both partners. Mareile Büscher's
historical studies have shown that in cases of conflict, patrons
were very open to mediation and that artists generally got their way without suffering consequences if they overstepped the
terms of their contract. That is one reason why those epochs produced
works that millions of people are prepared to travel by train and
plane to admire today.

If themischief takes its course and
Lehrter Bahnhof is completed according to the current plans, it will
still be celebrated as an architectural masterpiece and photographers
will find suitable perspectives to gloss over the distorted
proportions. But the eulogists and image-enhancers will always know
they are making the best of a bad job. And the owners will be
barred from even those compensations. They have got themselves into the
pickle of having to justify the alterations by claiming that Lehrter
Bahnhof is purely functional architecture without any
particular aesthetic value. This is their only way to get
around laws covering intellectual property rights. If it has no visual
added value, it can be altered at will. In future, whenever Hartmut Mehdorn, CEO
of Deutsche Bahn AG, is tempted to call the station beautiful, elegant
or even dignified, he will have to hold his tongue to avoid
admitting his legal adversaries were right.

The targeted attack on these two central aesthetic features
arouses the suspicion that an owner accustomed to having his own
way has violated the architects' rights in order to make the building comply
with his will. Despite claims to the contrary, no time was gained; it
was lost in discussions. Money was not saved; the costs increased. The
upshot is that culture was destroyed in the name of economics, while this will in fact weaken the economy.

The actions of Die Bahn may be psychologically abstruse,
but they are not without method, and have their historical precedents.
The planned inauguration date of Lehrter Bahnhof is also the five
hundredth anniversary of the laying of the foundation stone for St Peter's Basilica in Rome. The story of its construction was an incessant alternation of construction and demolition.
No new pope was satisfied until he had made the building his own by
destroying parts of his predecessor's plans and parts of the building
that had already been constructed.

For all the differences
between the buildings â epoch, function, design â the mechanism is
comparable. Applied to Lehrter Bahnhof, Mehdorn's swipe at the
architects' design also struck at the concept of his predecessor Heinz Dürr, whose wanted to make the railway competitive with road and air travel through a renaissance of the railway station,
and in the process create a cultural landmark. With his deformations,
Mehdorn has slashed himself free from the heritage of the ground
breaking former chief executive.

In the process, damage has been done to the architects' intellectual property, to an outstanding work of artistic functional architecture, to the reputation of the flat roof architects and above all, to the standing of the owners. For generations to come, the monstrosity of Lehrter Bahnhof will remain associated with the name of its disfigurer. In Hamburg they have never forgotten how Kaiser Wilhelm II stopped the original design of their main station with a flourish of the imperial quill. Everlasting damnation is not a pretty fate. Salvation for Mehdorn could yet come, in the guise of a judge who shows him mercy by granting Gerkan's suit.

In the case of St Peter's, a fabulous work was created in the end, because the destruction of already built parts was annulled.
It would be a calamity for the face of Berlin and modern architecture
if Lehrter Bahnhof were not to go through this process too: revising
the revision, lengthening the shortened roof, doing away with the flat
ceiling.

The possibility of a negation of the negation, a rejection of the rejection, is demonstrated by the station's optical counterpart, the Reichstag.
In 1992, the German Bundestag initially voted against having a dome
because it appeared to embody the imperial authoritarianism that had
caused Germany's downfall. After Michael Cullen and Tilman Buddensieg
â historian and art historian â discovered that the dome had been
constructed as a gesture of opposition to autocratic imperial power,
the Council of Elders, and later the whole Bundestag, overturned their original decision and commissioned Norman Fosterto design the dome, which has since become a symbol of the Republic. A
symbolism that cuts differently when we look out of the dome to the
north-west, to the new main station. The choice here involves more than
matters of etiquette. It is a question of mentality and a storm warning to the nation.

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The article was originally published in German in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on November 17, 2005.